The remaining fragments of the Greek kingdom in Europe and Asia I shall abandon to the Turkish arms; but the final extinction of the two last dynasties* which have reigned in Constantinople, should terminate the decline and fall of the Roman empire in the East. The despots of the Morea, Demetrius and Thomas,† the two surviving brothers of the name of PALEOLOGUS, were astonished by the death of the emperor Constantine, and the ruin of the monarchy. Hopeless of defence, they prepared, with the noble Greeks who adhered to their fortune, to seek a refuge in Italy, beyond the reach of the Ottoman thunder. Their first ap prehensions were dispelled by the victorious sultan, who contented himself with a tribute of twelve thousand ducats; and while his ambition explored the continent and the islands in search of prey, he indulged the Morea in a respite of seven years. But this respite was a period of grief, discord, and misery. The hexamilion, the rampart of the isthmus, so often raised and so often subverted, could not long be defended by three hundred Italian archers; the keys of Corinth were seized by the Turks; they returned from their summer excursions with a train of captives and spoil; and the complaints of the injured Greeks were heard with indifference and disdain. The Albanians, a vagrant tribe of shepherds and robbers, filled the peninsula with rapine and murder; the two despots implored the dangerous and humiliating aid of a neighbouring bashaw; and when he had quelled the revolt, his lessons inculcated the rule of their future conduct. Neither the ties of blood, nor the oaths which they repeatedly pledged in the communion and before the altar, nor the stronger pressure of necessity, could reconcile or suspend their domestic quarrels. They ravaged each other's patrimony with fire and sword; the alms and succours of the West were consumed in civil hostility; and their power was only exerted in savage and arbitrary executions. The distress and revenge of the weaker

*For the genealogy and fall of the Comneni of Trebizond see Ducange (Fam. Byzant. p. 195); for the last Palæologi, the same accurate antiquarian (p. 244. 247, 248). The Palæologi of Montferrat were not extinct till the next century; but they had forgotten their Greek origin and kindred. + In the worthless story of the disputes and misfortunes of the two brothers, Phranza (l. iii. c. 21— 30) is too partial on the side of Thomas; Ducas (c. 44, 45) is too brief, and Chalcocondylas (1. 8, ix. x.) too diffuse and digressive.

In

rival invoked their supreme lord; and, in the season of maturity and revenge, Mahomet declared himself the friend of Demetrius, and marched into the Morea with an irresistible force. When he had taken possession of Sparta, "You are too weak," said the sultan, "to control this turbulent pro vince; I will take your daughter to my bed; and you shall pass the remainder of your life in security and honour." Demetrius sighed and obeyed; surrendered his daughter and his castles; followed to Adrianople his sovereign and son, and received for his own maintenance, and that of his followers, a city in Thrace, and the adjacent isles of Imbros, Lemnos, and Samothrace. He was joined the next year by a companion of misfortune, the last of the COMNENIAN race, who, after the taking of Constantinople by the Latins, had founded a new empire on the coast of the Black Sea.* the progress of his Anatolian conquests Mahomet invested with a fleet and army the capital of David, who presumed to style himself emperor of Trebizond;† and the negotiation was comprised in a short and peremptory question, Will you secure your life and treasures by resigning your * See the loss or conquest of Trebizond in Chalcocondylas (1. 9, p. 263-266), Ducas (c. 45), Phranza (1. 3, c. 27), and Cantemir (p. 107). + Though Tournefort (tom. iii. lettre 17, p. 179) speaks of Trebizond as mal peuplée, Peysonnel, the latest and most accurate observer, can find one hundred thousand inhabitants. (Commerce de la Mer Noire, tom. ii. p. 72, and for the province, p. 53-90.) Its prosperity and trade are perpetually disturbed by the factious quarrels of two odas of janizaries, in one of which thirty thousand Lazi are commonly enrolled. (Mémoires de Tott, tom. iii. p. 16, 17.) [The present state of Trebizond has been shown in a note, p. 11 and 12, as also its modern historians, who have furnished details from a source unknown in Gibbon's time. The fall of its empire, and the fate of David, are related by Finlay, generally after Professor Fallmerayer, whose authority has been indicated at p. 11. (Greece and Trebizond, p. 481-495.) An affecting incident closes his narrative. After a few years' residence at Mavronoros, near Serres, the deposed emperor and his family were removed to Constantinople, where David, his seven sons, and his nephew Alexius, soon perished. Their dead bodies were thrown out unburied beyond the walls. No one ventured to approach them but the empress Helena, who, clad in a humble garb, repaired to the spot with a spade in her hand. During the day she guarded the bodies of her husband and children from the dogs that came to devour them, and in the darkness of the night deposited them in a trench which she dug. Her surviving daughter was lost to her in a Turkish harem. The widowed and childless mourner retired to a solitude, where grief soon conducted her to a refuge in the grave.-Ed.]

kingdom? or had you rather forfeit your kingdom, your treasures, and your life?" The feeble Comnenus was subdued by his own fears, and the example of a Mussulman neighbour, the prince of Sinope ;* who, on a similar summons, had yielded a fortified city with four hundred cannon and ten or twelve thousand soldiers. The capitulation of Trebizond was faithfully performed; and the emperor with his family, was transported to a castle in Romania; but on a slight suspicion of corresponding with the Persian king, David, and the whole Comnenian race, were sacrificed to the jealousy or avarice of the conqueror. Nor could the name of father long protect the unfortunate Demetrius from exile and confiscation; his abject submission moved the pity and contempt of the sultan; his followers were transplanted to Constantinople; and his poverty was alleviated by a pension of fifty thousand aspers, till a monastic habit and a tardy death released Palæologus from an earthly master. It is not easy to pronounce whether the servitude of Demetrius, or the exile of his brother Thomas,t be the most inglorious. On the conquest of the Morea, the despot escaped to Corfu, and from thence to Italy, with some naked adherents; his name, his sufferings, and the head of the apostle St. Andrew, entitled him to the hospitality of the Vatican; and his misery was prolonged by a pension of six thousand ducats from the pope and cardinals. His two sons, Andrew

* Ismael Beg, prince of Sinope or Sinople, was possessed (chiefly from his copper mines) of a revenue of two hundred thousand ducats. (Chalcocond. 1. 9, p. 258, 259.) Peysonnel (Commerce de la Mer Noire, tom. ii. p. 100) ascribes to the modern city sixty thousand inhabitants. This account seems enormous; yet it is by trading with a people that we become acquainted with their wealth and numbers. [Sinope, of late so calamitously notorious, is called by the Turks Sinub or Sinoup. The natural advantages which raised it to so high a degree of prosperity in ancient times, have been neutralized by the indolence of its modern occupants. Its population is reduced to five thousand. A small export trade in rice, fruit, and hides, enlivens the Greek quarter, rising on the peninsula that overlooks its valuable port. Reichard, tab. v. Finlay, Greece and Trebizond, p. 488. Malte Brun and Balbi, p. 650.—ED.] Spondanus (from

Gobelin, Comment. Pii II. 1. 5) relates the arrival and reception of the despot Thomas at Rome (A.D. 1461, No. 3). [In the eighteenth vol. of the Archæologia, the Rev. F. Vyvyan Jago, rector of Landulph in Cornwall, gives an account of a Palæologus, buried in his parish-church, who, without sufficient authority, is said to have been a descendant of the despot Thomas.-ED.]

and Manuel, were educated in Italy; but the eldest, contemptible to his enemies and burdensome to his friends, was degraded by the baseness of his life and marriage. A title was his sole inheritance; and that inheritance he successively sold to the kings of France and Arragon.* During his transient prosperity, Charles the Eighth was ambitious of joining the empire of the East with the kingdom of Naples; in a public festival, he assumed the appellation and the purple of Augustus ; the Greeks rejoiced, and the Ottoman already trembled at the approach of the French chivalry.+ Manuel Palæologus, the second son, was tempted to revisit his native country; his return might be grateful, and could not be dangerous, to the Porte; he was maintained at Constantinople in safety and ease; and an honourable train of Christians and Moslems attended him to the grave. If there be some animals of so generous a nature that they refuse to propagate in a domestic sate, the last of the imperial race must be ascribed to an inferior kind; he accepted from the sultan's liberality two beautiful females; and his

*

By an act, dated A.D. 1494, Sept. 6, and lately transmitted from the archives of the Capitol to the royal library of Paris, the despot Andrew Palæologus, reserving the Morea, and stipulating some private advantages, conveys to Charles VIII. king of France, the empires of Constantinople and Trebizond. (Spondanus, A.D. 1495, No. 2.) M. de Foncemagne (Mém. de l'Académie des Inscriptions, tom. xvii. p. 539-578) has bestowed a Dissertation on this national title, of which he had obtained a copy from Rome. [Ducange (Fam. Byzant. 248) says, that the despot Thomas died in 1465; and that his son Andrew, who married a woman from the streets of Rome, dying childless in 1502, bequeathed to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, the empire of the East, of which he imagined himself to be the heir. Further particulars respecting the conquest of the Morea, are given by Finlay (Greece and Trebizond, p. 310-319). Deserted or sold by their despots, the inhabitants of Monemvasia and other fortresses, defended their independence and invited the assistance of the Venetians, who thus obtained possession of many important posts in the peninsula, and were involved in long contests with the Turks. They held Coron and Modon till the year 1500, and it was not till 1540 that, by the loss of Nauplia and Monemvasia, they were finally driven out of the Peloponnesus. Montfaucon (Palæographia Græca. p. 79) notices some Greek MSS., written in the Morea at this time; but they are monuments of mental dotage, and throw no historical light on the age.-ED.]

+ See Philippe de Comines (1. 7, c. 14), who reckons with pleasure the number of Greeks who were prepared to rise, sixty miles of an easy navigation, eighteen days' journey from Valona to Constantinople, &c. On this occasion the Turkish empire was saved by the policy of Venice.

VOL. VII.

H

surviving son was lost in the habit and religion of a Turkish slave.

The importance of Constantinople was felt and magnified in its loss; the pontificate of Nicholas the Fifth, however peaceful and prosperous, was dishonoured by the fall of the Eastern empire; and the grief and terror of the Latins revived, or seemed to revive, the old enthusiasm of the crusades. In one of the most distant countries of the West, Philip duke of Burgundy entertained, at Lisle in Flanders, an assembly of his nobles; and the pompous pageants of the feast were skilfully adapted to their fancy and feelings.* In the midst of the banquet, a gigantic Saracen entered the hall, leading a fictitious elephant with a castle on his back; a matron in a mourning robe, the symbol of religion, was seen to issue from the castle; she deplored her oppres sion, and accused the slowness of her champions; the principal herald of the golden fleece advanced, bearing on his fist a live pheasant, which, according to the rites of chivalry, he presented to the duke. At this extraordinary summons, Philip, a wise and aged prince, engaged his person and powers in the holy war against the Turks; his example was imitated by the barons and knights of the assembly: they swore to God, the Virgin, the ladies, and the pheasant; and their particular vows were not less extravagant than the general sanction of their oath. But the performance was made to depend on some future and foreign contingency; and, during twelve years, till the last hour of his life, the duke of Burgundy might be scrupulously, and perhaps sincerely, on the eve of his departure. Had every breast glowed with the same ardour; had the union of the Christians corresponded with their bravery; had every country, from Swedent to Naples, supplied a just proportion of cavalry and infantry, of men and money, it is indeed probable that Constantinople would have been delivered, and that the Turks might have been chased beyond the Hellespont or the Euphrates. But the secretary of the emperor,

* See the original feast in Oliver de la Marche (Mémoires, p. 1, c. 29, 30), with the abstract and observations of M. de Ste. Palaye (Mémoires sur la Chevalerie, tom. i. p. 3, p. 182-185). The peacock and the pheasant were distinguished as royal birds. + It was found by an actual enumeration, that Sweden, Gothland, and Finland, contained one million eight hundred thousand fighting men, and consequently were far more populous than at present.